


what we've got

by sevdrag (seventhe)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Christmas Fluff, Christmas Tree, Goats, M/M, Wakanda (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22103596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhe/pseuds/sevdrag
Summary: “This tree is a fuckin’ shitshow,” Bucky tells him, grinning.“Yeah,” Clint says, applying more wire to the problem. “But it’sourshitshow.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 21
Kudos: 76





	what we've got

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elenorasweet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elenorasweet/gifts).



> YO i was in the mood for a little winterhawk of my own (after watching SO MANY COOL THINGS posted from the exchange!!!!) and this little fic came about due to a hilarious comedy of errors on my and CB's part, BUT
> 
> Nora definitely gets the BIGGEST BADASS OF THE EXCHANGE award for [personal reasons] so this is for you, honey, you're the real champ

It ain’t much, but it’s what they’ve got.

Their tree ain’t even a pine tree — it’s a little cape willow, barely a shrub, that they pulled outta the wastelands outside Wakanda, Bucky handling the saw while Clint stood guard with his bow, giggling a bit at their audacity and stupidity. They hadn’t seen any of the reavers that time, so they’d been lucky. _Christmas miracle,_ Clint had said. _Goddamn idiots,_ Bucky had replied, and Clint had just shrugged.

Their sole remaining solar panel gets saved for all the important shit until they can get another, so the tree won’t have lights either. Bucky knows Clint’s trying to rig something up for the top of the tree with one of their lanterns and a whole pile of wire they’d scrounged last week, but he’s fairly sure it ain’t worth the trouble. So far all it’s got hangin’ on it is crap. Clint had set some of the bits and pieces of scrap metal from Bucky’s last arm reno on the branches as a joke, and somehow they’d just added to it the last couple days: there’s a sock, a tiny screwdriver, somethin’ shiny on a string. One of Bucky’s old shawls is wrapped around the base to hide the jar of water the stump is in. They had to rig it up against the wall of their shack cause they had no other way to stand it up. One of Clint’s arrows is stuck into the trunk, with some sparkling shit hanging off of the fletching.

It’s a horrible tree, all things considered. But here they are, sitting across from each other at their little stone table, making ornaments.

“Y’know,” Clint says, breaking the silence. “This really isn’t all that different from what I’m used to.”

“Bullshit,” Bucky says, automatically. “Stark Tower Christmas must have been insane.”

“Yeah, those were pretty ridiculous.” Clint sighs, dreamily. “But nah. Not what I meant. Some years growing up we didn’t even get a tree cause Dad took the money to the tracks or something, and it isn’t like the circus had any time to stop and decorate.”

“Huh.” Bucky thinks back. It gets harder and harder to remember much of anything back then these days; his brain hadn’t had that much time to recover from Hydra scrambling it like an egg before Thanos had come and triggered this fucking planetary Armageddon — but the memories are there, sometimes, if he’s patient.

“Lights, though.” Clint sighs again. “We always had lights. Barney and I both had a string of our own, to hang up by our beds with thumbtacks. That’s what I remember most of all.”

(Bucky decides, somewhat emphatically, that he’s gonna hassle Tony Stark like a goddamn monster until he reinvents Christmas lights for Clint next year.)

The silence comes back, but it ain’t bad either. One of Bucky’s favorite things about Clint is that they actually don’t need to talk all the time. It’s easier for him, with his brain full of holes, to have moments where he can sit peacefully in his own head. It’s part of why he’s ended up here, with Clint, in a little goat farm slash lookout post at the edges of what remains of Wakanda.

“Ha,” Clint says eventually, after a period where he’s frantically working at some scrap metal and Bucky’s idly staring at their cape willow’s drooping leaves. “Check it out.” He holds up something, dangling from a piece of thread. At first glance it’s just more scrap metal hanging from a string, but then it rotates, and Bucky can make out four legs and what might be a head with horns.

“Which one is it?” Bucky asks, grinning.

“Steve, of _course,”_ Clint tells him. Clint has named all thirteen of their goats. Steve, of course, is the one with the biggest horns and the fewest brain cells. There’s a Phil goat that seems to boss around the others, a Nat goat who never listens to anyone. Pietro’s the fastest. Laura, the prettiest. Bucky doesn’t know all of the people Clint’s honored with goat names, so he doesn’t know whether they’re all dead or not. He doesn’t ask.

“He’d like it,” Bucky says, and smiles. Nobody’s sure whether Stevie’s dead or missing or what; all they know is Captain America was last seen getting into a Quinjet and hasn’t been seen since. Clint named a goat after him anyway.

Bucky looks down. He’s working his own bits of fabric and wire into something, his hands shaping automatically while he lets his thoughts surface from the bottom of the muddy bog that’s his working brain. His left hand’s at the end of its battery, so it’s just holding onto the bits while his right hand does — whatever it’s doing. He’ll leave it out in the sunlight tomorrow to charge; he can take care of the goats with one arm.

Something sparks, then, surfacing through the muck. “I remember the first time pa brought home a string of Christmas lights. We about shit ourselves, they were so pretty. Becca cried, I think. Stevie couldn’t stop drawin’ it, over and over, all different angles.”

“Oh my god,” Clint says, “are you literally so old that you remember when Christmas lights were invented? What did the dinosaurs put on their trees, Buck?”

“Fuck off,” Bucky says, grinning at him. He loves that Clint never makes a big deal when he remembers somethin’ like this - like Stevie would - and just snarks instead, letting the conversation continue. “They existed, but only like, the fuckin’ President could afford ‘em for a while. They hit stores when I was a kid, like maybe… fuck. Ten? Twelve? No fuckin’ clue. I just remember ma and pa had saved up enough to get one long string and when we put it on that tree, it was just.” 

The feeling that’s surfacing with the memory is a complicated one: nostalgia, regret, missing his family, but also — being here, a sense of that kinda peace that only comes round when people make time for it to come round. Like the holidays. “That was a good year,” Bucky says slowly. “Did up the tree, all pretty and lit up, and Stevie would just sit there with the lights off, pencils in hand, tryin’ to capture the way all those colored lights filtered through the branches.”

“The lights are the best part,” Clint tells him. “Were. Whatever. We’ll figure something out next year.”

Another bubbling of memories flutters through Bucky’s head: a bunch of candles lit, a menorah, and he and Becca and Stevie singing Christmas carols on a corner for pennies. Huh. Had they been Jewish? Christian? Not like it matters now; now all they got is Wakanda wasteland and a fuckin’ cape willow.

And Clint. Thank fuck he’s got Clint.

Bucky looks down, and realizes he’s made — a star. 

_A star?_ It isn’t a star at all, it’s two pieces of metal tubing crossed over each other with some fabric woven in-between. It looks nothing like a star. So why is it…?

And then there’s another memory: him an’ Becca with sticks and yarn, Ruthie an’ Leah watching carefully, trying to imitate their motions with clumsy hands and babyfat fingers. The sticks in a cross, wrapping ma’s scrap yarn carefully round to make a diamond shape; they called them stars, cause they were kids, and anything can be a star at that age.

“I remembered,” Bucky says to Clint, and offers him the star. The fabric scraps are from the last shirt Clint had made, but it’s the same concept: the fabric woven round to make the diamond star he now remembers from his childhood.

Clint takes the star, examines it, and looks up, beaming. “This is a good one, Buck. What did you remember?”

It takes a moment to choke it out around the sudden tightness in his throat. “Names. Their names.” Bucky swallows carefully. “Becca, Ruthie, an’ Leah.”

Clint’s face immediately softens, his eyes widening. “Your sisters?”

Bucky hasn’t been able to remember his own family’s names. Other than Becca: he’d remembered the little sister that was part co-conspirator and part pain in his ass, but the rest of them? He’d lost their names. Until now.

“Still can’t remember ma or pa,” Bucky tells Clint. “But ...yeah.”

“Write it down.” Clint’s smile is wide now, crooked and genuine, and Bucky takes a moment to bask in it before he stands up to get his notebook.

Paper’s scarce now, but the notebooks are important. Bucky’s got three of them full of memories that have surfaced just like this; he and Clint had exchanged some of their carded goat hair for this one he has now. He flips through to the next blank page, and then picks up their single pen and writes:

_I had three sisters. Rebecca, Ruth, Leah. Becca and I made Christmas ornaments together. Tried to teach the younger two._

Once he’s done, Bucky sets the notebook back into the plastic container where they keep most of their delicate paper objects. He turns around to find Clint attempting to fasten Bucky’s star to the top of their cape willow. It isn’t going well; the cape willow doesn’t really have a _top_ like an evergreen might, and Clint’s just using all that wire they’d scrounged to sort of _wrap_ the thing onto one of the delicate branches. 

“This tree is a fuckin’ shitshow,” Bucky tells him, grinning.

“Yeah,” Clint says, applying more wire to the problem. “But it’s _our_ shitshow.”

And Bucky just has to go over and kiss him. This brave idiot, who’d come back to Wakanda to try and help - leaving behind what Bucky thinks was a pretty idyllic existence somewhere in the States - this absolute dumbass, who’d stood next to Bucky in their sniper’s nest in devastated awe as Thanos’ power had struck the world like a meteor, a real apocalypse on earth; this man, who’d stayed with Bucky and T’Challa and whoever else had survived, who’d opened his heart to Bucky while they struggled with infrastructure and the changing atmosphere and lack of communications. 

Clint, who’d agreed to stay with him, to live with him, to position themselves at the borderline of what remained of Wakanda and the now-toxic wastelands as sentinels; Clint, who was funny and lethal and loved their little tent and their stupid shitshow tree. Clint, who sits and _allows_ Bucky to be whatever he needs to be, memories or not.

Bucky tugs Clint down with a hand in his hair and kisses him, suddenly overwhelmed with it all: remembering his sisters, making decorations, just being here in this destroyed world. Clint opens his mouth and Bucky plunders it: his tongue against Clint’s, his lips moving, trying to let Clint know without words that there are feelings in his chest cavity. Strong ones, good ones, the only good thing left on this shitshow continent in this shitshow world. Bucky kisses Clint because Clint is the kind of man who takes a fuckin’ cape willow and makes a holiday out of it. The kind of guy who makes time for that kinda peace in a place like this.

By the time he pulls back, Clint’s panting and his eyes are dark with want. “What was that for?”

“Pretend there’s mistletoe,” Bucky tells him, and pulls him down to kiss him again.

**Author's Note:**

> _please note: my brain created an apocalyptic world where Thanos just basically destroyed the planet cause he was pissed off, rather than snapping half of life away. like Ultron's plan to fuck shit up by dropping Sokovia, except Thanos-style. Wakanda had the technology to survive, but the world is so fucked nobody knows how any other countries are or what the fuck is going on. the wilderness around Wakanda is populated by Thanos' reavers, who basically just want to like, eat faces or something, so Clint and Bucky roam around and snipe them from great distances to save Wakanda from more destruction. they're hoping to get a second solar cell from Tony or Shuri for Christmas. there are goats. i just dunno man_


End file.
